Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

 

The next time you hear President Obama, your governor, or your mayor lining up teachers before a fiscal firing squad because of tight budgets, take a moment to reflect on the graph at right, courtesy of the Heritage Foundation.

Here’s the context from Lindsey Burke, writing at Heritage’s Foundry blog:

A new report by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice highlights just how bad the school staffing surge has become:

“Public schools grew staffing at a rate four times faster than the increase in students [from 1950 to 2009]. Of those personnel, teachers’ numbers increased 252 percent, while administrators and other non-teaching staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.”

The Friedman report points out that there are 21 “top-heavy states” that employ more non-teaching personnel in the school system than teaching personnel. Benjamin Scafidi, the report’s author, writes that “Virginia ‘leads the way’ with 60,737 more administrators and other non-teaching staff than teachers in its public schools.” In another example, the report points out that the state of Maine experienced an 11 percent decline in students from 1992 to 2009, yet it increased the number of administrators and other non-teaching personnel in its public schools by 76 percent.

That’s the type of staffing surge that, if reversed, could save some $24 billion annually, Friedman estimates.

The Friedman Foundation’s research mirrors Heritage findings on the dramatic increases in education staff over the decades. Since 2000, the percentage of teachers as a portion of school staff has decreased by nearly 3 percent; since 1970, that percentage has declined by 16.5 percent. Notably, the percentage of teachers as a portion of school staff has decreased more than 28 percent since 1950. Today, teachers comprise just half of all education jobs.

Not surprisingly, academic achievement and graduation rates have shown little to no improvement over the same time period.

So let’s keep this whole ‘investing’ in education line of argument in perspective. Investments, after all, are supposed to produce returns.

Published in General
Like this post? Want to comment? Join Ricochet’s community of conservatives and be part of the conversation. Join Ricochet for Free.

There are 14 comments.

Become a member to join the conversation. Or sign in if you're already a member.
  1. Profile Photo Coolidge
    @Flapjack

    While I have no study to back up what I’ve seen in my time as a teacher, the administrative positions added almost always are “required” to deal with state and federal reporting and paperwork requirements.  Some (but only a few) are “required” as part of some grant a school accepts.

    So, it seems to me that more regulation and “accountability” results not in better schools but rather more administrators to monitor and report as required by regulations.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

    • #1
  2. Profile Photo Inactive
    @LucyPevensie

    Of course, if you’re going to create a huge federal education bureaucracy full of regulatory requirements like No Child Left Behind, you’re going to need a huge local bureaucracy to comply with the requirements.

    • #2
  3. Profile Photo Inactive
    @LucyPevensie

    Flapjack, we were posting at the same time.  Great minds think alike.

    • #3
  4. Profile Photo Member
    @TroySenik
    Flapjack: While I have no study to back up what I’ve seen in my time as a teacher, the administrative positions added almost always are “required” to deal with state and federal reporting and paperwork requirements.  Some (but only a few) are “required” as part of some grant a school accepts.

    So, it seems to me that more regulation and “accountability” results not in better schools but rather more administrators to monitor and report as required by regulations.  Wash, rinse, repeat. · 5 minutes ago

    While I’ve never seen how that breaks down on the nationwide scale being presented by Heritage, I have seen several studies highlighting exactly this trend in individual states. Many “accountability” measures translate to a new layer of bureaucracy outside of the schools overseeing a new layer of bureaucracy inside of the schools. When the outcomes still stubbornly refuse to rise (assuming standards aren’t dumbed down to create the illusion of progress on paper, as often happens), the cycle begins anew.

    • #4
  5. Profile Photo Inactive
    @Jordan

    It should be telling that we never talk of investing in “teaching,” but rather in “education.”

    Most administrative duties in schools used to be handled by teachers who simply did extra work.  If we could return to a model where about 25% jobs in education were dedicated to “administrators” (which, is kind of a euphemism if you know a little Latin).

    But this administrative glut is a symptom of the disease of education regulation.  Most of these jobs are caused by regulation, or in other words, a huge waste of money.

    • #5
  6. Profile Photo Inactive
    @VanceRichards

    Is the problem that it was shaped like a gun, or that he brought trans-fats to school?

    KC Mulville

    Duncan Winn: This may have something to do with the recent suspension of a 2nd grader over a pop tart that he bit into the shape of a gun. · 7 minutes ago

    Thank God the extra administrators were nearby to thwart the attack.

    This happened in the Baltimore area, and I heard it being discussed on local radio during my drive to work this morning. Apparently, the school is now defending their actions on the grounds that the gun-shaped pastry “could have scared other students.”

    What kind of weenies are afraid of weapons that you could eat into shape? Wouldn’t the “weapon” be rather thin?

    The Maryland General Assembly immediately drafted a bill to suppress assault pastries.

    Governor O’Malley now wants to raise taxes on pastries, 7 cents this year and 7 cents next year, claiming that this would be the only fiscally-responsible and mature approach.

    [Insert jokes here] · 8 minutes ago

    • #6
  7. Profile Photo Member
    @DuaneOyen
    KC Mulville

    Thank God the extra administrators were nearby to thwart the attack.

    This happened in the Baltimore area, and I heard it being discussed on local radio during my drive to work this morning. Apparently, the school is now defending their actions on the grounds that the gun-shaped pastry “could have scared other students.”

    What kind of weenies are afraid of weapons that you could eat into shape? Wouldn’t the “weapon” be rather thin?

    The Maryland General Assembly immediately drafted a bill to suppress assault pastries.

    Governor O’Malley now wants to raise taxes on pastries, 7 cents this year and 7 cents next year, claiming that this would be the only fiscally-responsible and mature approach.

    [Insert jokes here] · 44 minutes ago

    1) My daughter lives in Baltimore, and 2) Rob visits his family there all the time.  Based on standard activities there, that pastry might have been a disguised weapon. 

    After the final gun of the Super Bowl it took all of 30 seconds before the first police sirens sounded and helicopters were in place overhead.

    • #7
  8. Profile Photo Member
    @DuaneOyen

    Funding increases are always sold as “reducing class sizes”, as though that had any relationship to results.  When I was in the baby-boomer-bulge, I was never in a grade school class with fewer than 35 students- and it made essentially no difference.

    Here’s the Heritage report on real dollars spending.

    • #8
  9. Profile Photo Inactive
    @TheKingPrawn
    Flapjack: While I have no study to back up what I’ve seen in my time as a teacher, the administrative positions added almost always are “required” to deal with state and federal reporting and paperwork requirements.  Some (but only a few) are “required” as part of some grant a school accepts.

    So, it seems to me that more regulation and “accountability” results not in better schools but rather more administrators to monitor and report as required by regulations.  Wash, rinse, repeat. · 53 minutes ago

    A friend who is the principal of the Washington Youth Academy tells me there is federal money he won’t touch because it’s cheaper to not take the money.

    • #9
  10. Profile Photo Member
    @TroySenik
    Duane Oyen: Funding increases are always sold as “reducing class sizes”, as though that had any relationship to results.  When I was in the baby-boomer-bulge, I was never in a grade school class with fewer than 35 students- and it made essentially no difference.

    California did this in the 90s (under a Republican governor, no less) and ended up spending over $2 billion (most expensive education reform initiative in state history). The program didn’t make a whit of difference for the students, but the hiring binge it occasioned did a nice job of padding the bottom lines of the teachers unions.

    • #10
  11. Profile Photo Member
    @DuncanWinn

    This may have something to do with the recent suspension of a 2nd grader over a pop tart that he bit into the shape of a gun.

    • #11
  12. Profile Photo Inactive
    @VanceRichards

    Good comments. It would be interesting to see what percentage of federal and state funding goes toward meeting federal and state regulations.

    As for Duane Oyen’s comment, I had over 30 kids in all of my classes growing up and I . . . OK, bad example, but I know plenty of people who turned out fine. Is the issue really smaller classes for the students or larger vacation homes for the union bosses?

    Also, while a graph of headcount is nice, I would like to see that in dollars. For every dollar spent on teachers, how much is spent on administration?

    • #12
  13. Profile Photo Inactive
    @KCMulville
    Duncan Winn: This may have something to do with the recent suspension of a 2nd grader over a pop tart that he bit into the shape of a gun. · 7 minutes ago

    Thank God the extra administrators were nearby to thwart the attack.

    This happened in the Baltimore area, and I heard it being discussed on local radio during my drive to work this morning. Apparently, the school is now defending their actions on the grounds that the gun-shaped pastry “could have scared other students.”

    What kind of weenies are afraid of weapons that you could eat into shape? Wouldn’t the “weapon” be rather thin?

    The Maryland General Assembly immediately drafted a bill to suppress assault pastries.

    Governor O’Malley now wants to raise taxes on pastries, 7 cents this year and 7 cents next year, claiming that this would be the only fiscally-responsible and mature approach.

    [Insert jokes here]

    • #13
  14. Profile Photo Inactive
    @FrederickKey

    Where I live there are occasional grumblings about the property taxes that support the town and the county. But my school tax is more than THREE TIMES as high as all the others combined! That means for the TRIPLE the cost of police, fire equipment (mostly volunteer firemen here), county emergency services, garbage collection, snow plowing, the libraries, the sheriff’s office, the county lockups, the county old people’s place, the county health services, the roads, the free bus service for the needy, the maintenance of public spaces, insurance for all of it, and all the big and little governments in between, I can help educate someone else’s children poorly. In fact, with the local education budget divided on a per-student basis, I am educating four-fifths of one child.

    I know some of the services I listed get tax money that has been laundered through our state and the fed–but not as much as the schools do.

    Even if the schools weren’t micturating the money away, even if they were spending it in effective ways, it would be too expensive.

    • #14
Become a member to join the conversation. Or sign in if you're already a member.